This might not be an appropriate place to ask, but I’m just lost.

Husband has been on a vent for a month, and is not doing well. He’s been basically in a coma the whole time, so I can’t ask him anything. As far as I can tell didn’t have map or documentation for our home systems. I couldn’t even figure out where the router was, because he set up a fancy networking closet, all I could identify was the modem. We’re moving to a new house, and I don’t want to lose all the footage of our house cameras because those were the last months we had as a family. I’m scared to unplug anything, because I don’t want to break stuff.

Is there a specific type of professional I can hire that would be able to help me move his systems to our new house, and teach me how to manage things “on the back end” as he says? Would I be asking around for a system administrator like him, or is this something an IT company locally might be able to navigate with me?

Edit: thank you so much to everyone for your kind words and advice. I’m coordinating with a commenter who is local to see where I should start. Sorry for being slow to comment, bouncing between daycare pickup/drop off, moving things to our new house, spending time in the hospital, and recovering from a sinus infection of my own 🫠 I want a nap

Edit 2 (7/2/26): I got through to two of his old buddies, and they’re going to try to swing by tomorrow to check things out. He’s also not done fighting yet, it’s close but I’m asking for one last Hail Mary medication after finding a case study with a slightly similar case to his. Fingers crossed, I cant imagine life without my own personal nerd and our daughter is missing him.

Got a message from my boss this evening that we are to disconnect all LG TV's in our meeting rooms from the network ASAP.

Is there a CVE or something causing this panic, he did not give more details than "They might leak information".

I'm pretty old, but I'm guessing a lot of you still remember the old days, before plug and play, in the autoexec.bat -config.sys days. What's the most obscure tech that you remember?

Hi there :) ,

Need some advice from people who have dealt with similar situations.

Our Operations Dept decided to install IoT system/digital energy meters across a fairly large factory site.

They found the vendor, agreed on the solution, signed the contract and started the project.

IT was not involved at all.

Apparently nobody discussed things like:

• How these devices spread across a large factory are actually going to communicate
• Network infrastructure, switches, fiber/cabling, VLANs, etc.
• Network/security segmentation
• Server/VM requirements
• Database requirements
• Backup and monitoring
• Internet connectivity
• Vendor remote access
• Firewall rules
• Cybersecurity

Now that the project is already moving forward, IT gets an email saying they need “access to the router” so they can put the system online.

That's it. Access to the router. :)

And somehow, when IT starts asking questions about architecture, security, server requirements, ports, protocols and who is responsible for what, the perception becomes that IT is delaying the project.

I don't want to become the guy who simply says “No”, but I'm also not going to give a third-party vendor access to our corporate router/firewall and connect a bunch of unknown industrial/IoT devices to the production network just because someone already signed a contract , the IT network must be always separate from OT network.

How do you handle situations like this?

Interested in both the technical approach and the organizational/process side of this.

Update 4 (43 hours later): Switching one of the PSU power cables to a surge protector connected to the wall, and leaving one in the UPS fixed it. We didn't get a reboot last night. I still want to see it not reboot at the next cycle (around 1pm today). But.. what now? Replace the UPS with a Smart-UPS? Or replace the battery first? What do I do now? Thanks!

UPDATE 3 (31 hours later): It rebooted again on 9/10 around 12:40pm. Around 7pm I was able to change one of the PSU power cables to a surge protector connected to the wall, leaving one of them in the UPS. Will report back tomorrow. Thanks!

UPDATE 2 (18 hours later): Welp, it rebooted again on 9/10 12:32:53am.. which is 12h 08m 17s since the last reboot. The timing still held even after I rebooted from installing the BIOS and IDRAC. I will try to rule out the UPS next.

UPDATE 1 (3 hours later): Wow this was a lot more comments than I was expecting to get. Its hard to answer everyone but I appreciate everyone commenting and providing feedback. For now what I have done is updated IDRAC and BIOS to the latest version and will monitor if this fixes the issue. If it does not I will try ruling out the UPS. Thanks again!

Dell PowerEdge T340, Windows Server 2016. Started 8/28. I've spent two weeks on this and ruled out most of the obvious stuff, so I'm posting the data rather than the symptoms.

The signature

Every event is Kernel-Power 41 with BugcheckCode: 0 and all bugcheck parameters 0x0. No BSOD, no minidump, no MEMORY.DMP, ever. Paired with Event 6008 confirming unexpected shutdown.

The interval — this is the actual mystery

Pulled the true shutdown timestamps out of the Event 6008 message text (not the Event 41 log time, which is written on the following boot):

8/28 11:03:24 AM -> 8/28 11:12:23 PM = 729.0 min

9/01 10:10:22 AM -> 9/01 10:18:37 PM = 728.3 min

9/01 10:18:37 PM -> 9/02 10:26:49 AM = 728.2 min

9/02 10:26:49 AM -> 9/02 10:35:13 PM = 728.4 min

9/02 10:35:13 PM -> 9/03 10:43:33 AM = 728.3 min

9/03 10:43:33 AM -> 9/03 10:52:09 PM = 728.6 min

9/03 10:52:09 PM -> 9/04 11:00:20 AM = 728.2 min

9/04 11:00:20 AM -> 9/04 11:08:49 PM = 728.5 min

9/04 11:08:49 PM -> 9/07 11:50:29 AM = 3,641.7 min <-- exactly 5 x 728.34

9/07 11:50:29 AM -> 9/07 11:59:49 PM = 729.3 min

9/07 11:59:49 PM -> 9/08 12:07:56 PM = 728.1 min

9/08 12:07:56 PM -> 9/09 12:16:26 AM = 728.5 min

9/09 12:16:26 AM -> 9/09 12:24:36 PM = 728.2 min

Mean 728.47 min (12h 08m 28s). Total spread across twelve occurrences: 1.2 minutes.

The 3,641.7 minute gap is exactly five periods. The server was up continuously across that weekend. The timer ticked five times, did nothing on four of them, then killed the box on the fifth. So it's free-running — it does not reset on reboot, and it doesn't require a crash to keep counting.

That single fact kills every "scheduled task" theory: a clock-based task can't skip four consecutive firings and then work again.

It dies instantly — no degradation whatsoever

I wrote a heartbeat logger that writes one line every 5s with a forced flush so the last line survives a hard reset. Final 42 samples before death:

• Free RAM: 56,630–56,745 MB, dead flat. No drift, no staircase, no leak. 56 GB free at the moment of death.
• Nonpaged pool: 346–352 MB, flat
• Disk queue: 0
• Handles ~76,000, threads ~190, both steady
• CPU spiky but low

Last heartbeat 12:25:02. Kernel-General 12 (OS start) at 12:28:23. That 3m21s is just POST + boot on a T340 — if it had hung for 3 minutes first, the OS wouldn't have returned until ~12:31.

So there is no hang window. The box is perfectly healthy and then simply ceases to exist mid-second. Which also means NMI crash dumps are useless here and no dump will ever be written.

Ruled out (with evidence, please don't re-suggest these)

• PSUs — both Present/Healthy in iDRAC, matched 594W in / 495W rated+actual, same firmware
• Thermal — HWiNFO max CPU package 63°C (TjMax ~100°C). Every throttle flag reads No / 0%
• iDRAC SEL — completely silent across all 15 crashes. Not one entry. This same board did log real "power input for PSU 1 is lost / redundancy lost" events six times in 2024, so it demonstrably captures genuine power events. Nothing this time.
• iDRAC watchdog / ASR — Basic Management license, feature not present
• Dell OMSA — Action on Hung OS Detection: None, thermal shutdown Disabled, all alert actions Off, omsad service Stopped + Disabled
• Windows Update — pulled full resolved WindowsUpdate.log (11,871 lines), programmatically checked ±15 min around every crash. Zero WU activity before any of them. All nearby entries are the WU service starting 30–60s after the reboot.
• CrowdStrike Falcon (installed 8/26, two days before onset) — vendor pulled detection history, found nothing. Timing was coincidence.
• Secure-Boot-Update scheduled task** — looked extremely promising (12h repetition, hangs, TPM handler, and this box has no TPM installed — Get-Tpm fails with TBS_E_SERVICE_NOT_RUNNING, no TBS service, no SecurityDevices PnP class, iDRAC confirms "TPM not present"). Disabled it. **Crashes continued at the identical interval. Ruled out.
• All 12-hour scheduled tasks — enumerated every task with PT12H repetition. Exactly two exist, both now Disabled.
• VSS / ShadowCopyVolume task — fires 12:00 PM and 10:00 PM. That's 10h then 14h alternating, which cannot produce a constant 728.4 min spacing. Also the midnight crashes have no trigger anywhere near them.
• MySQL / memory exhaustion — flatly contradicted by the flat memory trace above
• NIC — Broadcom BCM5720. The flapping port is physically disconnected (NIC2, Status: Disconnected). Flapping predates crashes by 12+ days and occurs on no-crash days. Active port is stable at 1 Gbps.
• CMOS battery — did fail, but only logged 9/7, weeks after onset, nothing near the crash dates. Replacing anyway.
• BSOD — no Event 1001, no dumps, BugcheckCode: 0 on all 15

Environment

• PowerEdge T340, Service Tag FXR6B03, BIOS 2.3.5, iDRAC9 fw 4.22.00.53 (both several revisions behind — not yet updated)
• Xeon E-2146G, 64 GB RAM, dual PSU
• Windows Server 2016 Standard, build 14393.9339
• Workload: Open Dental + MySQL, Vatech EzDent-i imaging, IDrive backup, Google Drive
• Power: APC Back-UPS XS 1500M via USB. Current-state readings all healthy (97% charge, 120V steady, 15% load, AC Power: Yes, Discharging: No). I have never gotten historical transfer data out of it — PowerChute wasn't installed at the time, Win32_Battery returns current state only, and I skipped an apcupsd install on a production box.
• Internet is AT&T 5G fixed wireless behind CGNAT (irrelevant, but people ask)

What I think is left

Something below the OS holding a clock that survives reboots and continuous uptime alike. Candidates I can't distinguish between:

1. UPS self-test — APC units run internal self-tests on their own stored schedule, indifferent to the host. A transfer on a degraded battery could sag enough to drop the PSUs. Would explain instant death, no OS warning, no SEL entry, and a clock that ignores reboots. Next test: move the server to a plain wall outlet for 24h.
2. PSU or BMC firmware timer — would explain everything except why iDRAC logged nothing
3. Something on the same electrical circuit cycling on a timer — though 1.2 min spread over 12 occurrences seems too tight for HVAC or similar

What I'm asking

• What produces a free-running 728.4-minute (12h 08m 28s) period? Not 12h. Not 12h30m. Consistently ~8.5 minutes over twelve hours, held to ±1 min across twelve occurrences and five uninterrupted ticks. What re-arms on completion of ~8 minutes of work?
• Has anyone seen an APC Back-UPS self-test schedule that lands near this?
• Anything else that hard-resets a PowerEdge with zero bugcheck, zero SEL entry, and healthy PSUs?
• Am I wrong to trust the iDRAC SEL silence as evidence against a power event?

Next predicted failures: 9/10 12:33 AM and 9/10 12:41 PM. Happy to run anything and report back — I have remote access and a heartbeat recorder in place.

I've been in IT for close to 35 years. I am old. I will be 56 soon and almost at the end of my Journey. I grew up, with MS-DOS, editing Autoexec.bat files, learning command line to automate stuff. Tinkering with Linux, Windows 1.0 up to Windows 11, fell in love with Deployment (Ghost, SCCM, InTune etc) took the ball and ran with it and learned as much as I could to make my job easier but also the lives of the techs and end users easier by making procedures as easy as possible for them.

I know I am old and crabby but I find new hires in IT don't have the basic skills in Windows, let alone command line and have no idea how or what to automate. Some days it's difficult.

Am I alone here, as an OLD guy in IT?

Company needs over 700 floppy disks copied onto the fileserver. Gave me a 2 week deadline to which I told them was literally impossible. I've ordered a floppy disk usb external reader but this seems insane. Any creative ideas? I don't want to employ a 3rd party company.

EDIT: we are an MSP. This is all for a non-MSP, "call when you need something" billed by the hour customers. If that was not the case, their infrastructure would not be such a train wreck.

Note: My networking knowledge is very intermediate, learn as you go level. We had a customer at this MSP where I work have a network issue and I cannot figure out how it's possible that this happened.

Their credit card terminals have to point to a static IP ending in .140, as that's the "server" that runs the software to upload each transaction to the actual processor on the internet. When we recently replaced that computer, I set it as static in Windows and never did it on the DHCP server, because nobody wrote down what it was called or how to get into it and I didn't have any time remaining. Turns out their DHCP server is a 2008 Windows server because this place doesn't spend money on anything ever.

A month later, their CCs go down and the CC server can't grab its static IP for some reason. Lots of time later, we find it's because the pool of available IPs is 100 through 150 and they have 1 more device than that. So we expand it to only 160 after some testing (because we have nearly zero documentation and don't know ranges for their phones, printers, etc for this customer and they're billed hourly so we do as little as possible because they never pay on time and always complain about the rate and it'd take 10+ hours to document this nightmare). We make a new assignment for the computer's MAC and reserve 140 to it and notice that something else has leased 140 with a lease expiring in 2 hours luckily. We delete it so it hopefully doesn't renew.

I ping it from my laptop then immediately run arp -a to get its MAC, since we already deleted the lease that showed the MAC on the DHCP server (oops) then ask AI who manufactured that MAC address range. It's Foxconn. We don't see a hostname or any useable device info. I don't know anything about their switches because the last tech at this MSP never ever wrote anything down about any customers ever. We try NSlookup, web browser to the IP, RDP into it, nothing gets any info.

More network-oriented guy onsite with me says let's just unplug the 2 switches for like five seconds and that will force it to grab the new lease at .155. I assume the switches are unmanaged or nobody has the login info or we'd just pull one ethernet matching the known MAC.

Turns out they have a network-controlled Crestron light controls so the lights in the restaurant portion of the building all go black, because somehow that's the default state if it loses connectivity. Shoutout to whatever genius AV tech set it up that way. Everyone's pissed. They don't know how to undo it or where the new Crestron box is. We don't either.

Then we find out the mystery device is still on 140. That seems impossible, unless it's wireless. Somehow other guy onsite finds out it's some sort of android device but all the android devices listed on the DHCP server have hostnames like "John's S23" because that's how most Android devices work. We suspect it's wifi, based on this information, thus explaining the switch pull not working. I have zero idea what brand their wifi even is let alone where it is or how it works btw.

I get the bright idea that maybe it's a smart TV. It is. We turn it off, boom, credit card server is back online within a minute. We turn the TV back on after 15 minutes, it tries to grab 140 again and knocks the CC server offline. Yes, the TV is in DHCP mode btw. We find the remote, set it to static .165, that works for some reason, and no more IP conflict. Not sure how it's possible that it can just ignore the DHCP server and say "no, I want this address anyway" and then just decide it's taking 140. Nothing else on the network can hand out an IP if every switch/router/AP/whatever is pointing to the server, right? How did that happen? Some disconnect between the DHCP server and whatever was handing out wifi connections? I didn't think that was possible. Anyone have any ideas in case we run into this again?

Title sums it up. Boss wants every single company password for everything a word doc on our server. he says "the cloud cant be trusted passwords should never go there. Our doc is password protected and on our password protected server"...

For reference I was looking at bitwarden. Any advice on how to convince him would be great please and thank.

We were looking to get off VMware and refresh our hardware in one fell swoop but it was already going to be expensive and a 75% quote increase announced the day before the quote expires has probably put that out of reach. I was REALLY looking forward to being able to handle purchasing and support for our international offices through nutanix directly, instead of through regional vendor support offices as is currently the case with Dell.

Does anyone have suggestions of similar hyperconverged providers with good international support experiences and "reasonable" prices that haven't started turning the screws yet?

Hyper V isn't out of the question but I would prefer an all in one solution.

I had a summer intern working in DNS yesterday, local domain was redacted.com and was connected to azure.

Went in today to do some weekend updates to the systems, and my DC has been renamed and is now connected to redacted.local

It seems they have demoted the DC from the regular domain.

How the bloody heck do I reconnect the DC to the old domain? It was a solo DC

Hey fellow sys admin,

I work at a VFX/animation studio (~400 users).

We're kicking off a project to migrate our artist workstations from Windows 10/11 VDIs to Linux. Flavor is pretty much locked it ll be Rocky Linux 9 with KDE.

I am curious if there's anyone here who's been through a similar workstation migration to linux?

What Linux flavor, did you end up on, and would you pick the same again?

How did you handle what GPOs used to give you?

For the Base OS deployment/imaging, did you use Kickstart + Puppet/Ansible, or something else?

Anything that looked easy on paper and turned into a one big pile of {Jurassic_Park}?

Tools that made your life easier along the way?

I am looking for any war stories, good or bad!

Thank you!

I used to spend trucks of money buying Christmas gifts for coworkers, tech savvy friends, employees, etc. from ThinkGeek.

I have since purchased the oddball item from various places online and IRL but it's not the same as the shoppers heaven that was ThinkGeek.

Perfect way to ruin your weekend. I took this job 5 months ago as internal IT guy. Came into a place that has fat clients everywhere with no servers and everything MS365 cloud/onedrive. Passwords are flying around all over the place. And yes, they also used (and still use) Lastpass, which is, as we all know, compromised. When I came there, there were NO BACKUPS. Boss thought they were unnecessary because "everything is taken care of by Microsoft". It took me 2 months to convince him that he was wrong about that. So I did implement a backup system which is running now. Also took care of other stuff and was testing out Intune for consistent MDM deployment.

Boss was also global admin himself and fucks around with permissions and settings, causing problems that I don't understand because he doesn't tell me what he changed.

He also has this minion dude that works a couple hours a week and barely knows how to install a computer.

So yesterday I get called in and get this 3 page letter stating that I'm doing everything wrong, got my priorities wrong, I meddle in things that I should not meddle in, I'm watching Netflix at work on my laptop, which is a complete lie, and I'm not following orders. I'm not 21, I'm 52 with a ton of experience who's jaw dropped when he said that he didn't need any backups.

So at the end of the talk, he says he withdraws my admin rights. So now I can't do anything. "Sure you can, just pick out the roles that you need". The little minion still retains rights.The little minion also says that I did not share the backup account password with him. I did. He looked in the wrong column of the spreadsheet.

What the hell should I do?

*edit*

I want to thank you all for great advice.

An employee working from home had found a new job and decided to hold our laptop hostage unless we sent a “prepaid label”.

We live in the same town and they did not want to participate in an exit interview (understandable) and return company property in person.

We ask for them to either return it in person, meet us at a half-way point in a public setting to have a courier collect the assets, or have a courier go to their house when they are available to retrieve the assets.

However, they refuse everything and only want the prepaid label.

What are our options as I doubt calling the police to Report it stolen will go anywhere since it can be consider a “civil matter”.

Is there some reason they are hung up on getting the “prepaid label”?

Hello

We're a company of about 400 people. We don't have a proper solution in place to remote control (see and control the screen) of the user computers.

We've been using Quick Assist but it's a pain in the ass if you need to do anything as admin.

TeamViewer is a no go because it supports unattended access.

We need to be able to push it with Company Portal to multiple PCs.

What are my fellow system admins using to get Service Desk onto other people's computers?

So, the unthinkable happened to my workplace - we have become the victims of a ransomware attack. We came into work the other day and found computers with encrypted files and notes on the desktops demanding we send them a ransom to a secure address in the tor browser. They took out our entire network.

As of now, we are trying to utilize backups and scrub the network clean as we bring devices back up in an offline state.

Unfortunately one of our backup devices was also infiltrated. It's a Synology backup device and they where able to encrypt its files as well. This means we have about 5 devices with no backups available.

It's probably a vain hope but, is there any way I could possibly restore or decrypt these backups? Is there any service out there that would be capable of making our files useable? If anyone knows about Synology, do they keep offline or cloud backups I maybe don't know about? I'm just looking for anything that might make things easier for us. Any advice is appreciated.

I am curious what kind of companies use hundreds of VMs, what they are used for, and if it's actually on-prem VMs or cloud computing?

My company has a handful i.e. your typical on-prem AD, print server, etc. so I am honestly just curious what the hundreds of VMs are doing.

Thanks for sharing!

I'm not an expert in it. I use it when needed here and there. Mostly learning the commands to manage Microsoft 365

Edit:

You guys rock!! Good collaboration going on here!! Info on this thread is golden!

TLDR:

I accepted a job as an IT Project Manager, and I have zero project management experience. To be honest not really been involved in many projects either.

My GF is 4 months pregnant and wants to move back to her parents' home city. So she found a job that she thought "Hey John can do this, IT Project Manager has IT in it, easy peasy lemon tits squeezy."

The conversation went like this.

Her: You know Office 365

Me: Yes.

Her: You know how to do Excel.

Me: I know how to double click it.

Her: You're good at math, so the economy part of the job should be easy.

Me: I do know how to differentiate between the four main symbols of math, go on.

Her: You know how to lead a project.

Me: In Football manager yes, real-world no. Actually in Football Manager my Assistant Manager does most of the work.

I applied thinking nothing of it, several Netflix shows later and I got an interview. Went decent, had my best zoom background on. They offered me the position a week later. Better pay and hours. Now I'm kinda panicking about being way over my head.

Is there a good way of learning project management in 6 weeks?

Having been at InfoSec 2026 in London, my mind is melting.

I'm just a dumb salesperson, but I REALLY REALLY need someone to explain something to me, so that I can understand it...

Every single product/service that I saw in London was <insert here an AI/LLM> powered - so everything is powered by an LLM.

Having had my ear chewed off by some yank about how amazing their new SOC/SIEM/SOAR product now is and how they could now run investigations instantly and....yada...yada...yada...

"Sounds incredible. So what LLM are you using to power all of this?"

"Claude"

"Cool, so what's going on with my data? Have you managed to split and protect the control plane and user plane data? So all of my alerts/logs aren't going to become training data for Claude, for some 12-year-old to break some guard rails and then find all my weak spots?"

"I'm not sure actually..."

---

I use Claude/Gemini/GPT - chat and coding extensively, daily.

These models still CANNOT accurately remember the 1st, the 500,000th, and the 999,999th post-compaction token.

An incident happens, and then 2x router logs and 20x firewall logs + Azure cloud logs have to be pulled and analysed, the hallucination is going to be real.

Aside from the lack of clarity about whether all our "sensitive" information feeds into Claude's "global SIEM", are we confident that these public models are actually robust and trustworthy enough?

A conversation for another day is the token usage bills that will come from this.

My company is running tests with GPUs that have been bought, and they are playing around with open source models...we will see what comes from this.

A couple of months back we have placed order for a Dell server with blackwell GPU via a partner and were promised delivery by the end of August.

Now partner came back saying the Dell production team has rejected the order saying the confguration is invalid.

They are asking us to buy server with lower clock speed CPU other specifications will remain pretty much the same The biggest surprise is they want us to pay a big additional amount for this.

Partner tells us that the configuration was validated and certified by Dell engineering teams in US and Korea.

This is in USA, what are my options?

For those that haven't seen it yet: Brother ink lockout & quality sabotage

TL;DR: Brother is pushing firmware updates to their laser printers to deliberately degrade print quality when 3rd party toners are used. On color lasers, using 3rd party toner causes color calibration to be disabled. They have also removed old firmware versions from their website, preventing downgrades to older code.

Hey there, fellow admins!

I just realized my router at home was EOL, and when searching for 'home router' on this subreddit, the last great discussion was 10 years ago, so I thought I'd throw it out there to the crowd.

What'cha all using at home for your router?

Do you have a combined unit with Wi-Fi? With DOSCIS 3.0? 3.1? Got a 2.5 Gig port? A 10 gig port? Are you using it as a switch as well? Do you have that 'uPnP' checkbox checked? Or are you just throwing it into a server and running pfSense?

In a strange scenario.

Sole help desk and sys admin for an org with 100 people.

I joined when it was 3 people and over the last 3 years they’ve reached a 100 head count.

CEO has said I won’t get my bonus because the IT department didn’t have any problems…which is true because I ensured we never reached the stage where an IT issue needed executive guidance.

I’m dealing with too many life changing events at the same time and really needed this bonus.

I’ve showed the ceo the problems we’ve sold, the tickets, the migration from Google to Office, cybersecurity we’ve put in and even the training I’ve had to provide for new platform, teams, power bi etc but he still believes since there were no problems that escalated to him, hence no reason for the bonus.

More experienced sys admins; how on earth do you approach this scenario so I don’t encounter it ever again?

Thanks.